An RT-award-winning literary agent with 20 years experience in numerous genres opens up about her experience and adventures in publishing and the world beyond it.

Friday, July 20, 2007

Just a Quick Note as I head to Camp NEcon

I am getting ready to dash out the door to camp NEcon, a small convention of mostly horror writers that takes place on a college campus. I've been attending it on and off for the past 20 years (I probably go every other year). We refer to it as Camp Necon, because we show up in shorts and T-shirts and roast marshmallows and tell ghost stories and stay up way too late being silly.

But, as usual, I'm running out the door, as I have worked all morning.

I came back from vacation Sunday night and hit the ground running Monday morning. I had expected it to be a light week, but I came back to two contracts, four proposals and a ton of follow-up, so I have not had a moment to rest.

Also had to send out 19 anthology payments that the publisher was supposed to send out, but failed to after more than a year of pleading. When the 5th editor of this anthology was fired, I begged him to just send the contributors' money to me, because I was so tired of pleading with the publisher to pay them. But it added a half day of bookkeeping to my work-load.

4 comments:

Lori, just curious why pubs would be so flaky over payment? Even going through numerous editors, one would think it fairly easy to drop a check in the mail to authors. Do contracts have payment stipulations in them that dictate when obligations are to be paid? What a huge frustration something like that must be. Oh, and have fun at camp.

I went to NECON once when I lived in Rhode Island. It was clear that people knew each other so well and had so many inside jokes that I wandered around the whole weekend feeling like an outsider. It was like attending someone else's family reunion.

NEcon is a small con that many people have been going to for years. You have to be forward - I always meet NEcon virgins when I go. Two of them from 3 years ago have been my roommates the last few times I've gone. But you have to join in on conversations in the hallways or in the quad. You can't be shy.

Re: flaky publishers. They don't intend to do this. It's just that without an active advocate asking for the money, it falls to the bottom of the pile because it's not the usual pay-out. Let's face it - no one wants to write 19 checks, if they don;t have to.